Time again for those wonderful political editorial cartoons. First I want to bring you this essay by Mr. Fish. I’ve no doubt that many of you know my fondness for editorial cartoons. I think they are one of the most essential forms of expression and feel sure that you will agree they are vital in times like these. So please read this essay in full. It is a long read but worth it.

Mr. Fish is the curator of “Drawing Conclusions,” an exhibit exploring the history of editorial cartooning on display at USC Annenberg’s Second Floor Gallery and Room 207 from Oct. 24 to May 13, 2013. It is co-sponsored by The Future of Journalism Foundation, a project of Community Partners.

I have no idea what readership is of written editorials, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the readership of editorial cartoons.
–Paul Conrad, editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times

Stop them damned pictures! I don’t care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures!
–William “Boss” Tweed, discredited New York politician responding to editorial cartoons by Thomas Nast

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.
–Pablo Picasso

For reasons that may have to do only with the perfunctory indifference that comes with incuriosity, there has never been a precise understanding by the dominant culture of what an editorial cartoonist is. Having been inexorably linked to journalism because their work has traditionally been published in daily newspapers, the value and professional integrity of editorial cartoonists have been unfairly forced to rise and fall with the health of the Fourth Estate.

Thus, with the steady disintegration of the print media and the pandemic elimination of staff cartoonist positions from periodicals everywhere, the question has become: Without an industry to sustain the definition of what an editorial cartoonist has come to mean to the public mind, what will happen to those men and women who draw pictures containing a political or social message? When circumstances in a society shift dramatically enough to make extinct a profession so narrowly defined by myopic and mainstream ideas, does this mean the end of the activity previously exercised within that profession, or does it merely demand a reconfiguration of consciousness allowing for the emergence of a more enlightened understanding of what the editorial cartoonist’s job is and where it might best find support, institutional or otherwise? In other words, is cartooning a vocation or a calling?

It’s arguable that editorial cartooning, in one form or another, has been with us ever since, in the words of Mark Twain, God made the mistake of preserving sin by not forbidding Eve to devour the snake, an act of bureaucratic mismanagement so fundamentally destructive that our sense of moral self-determinism has never been the same. Nor has our belief in the absolute wisdom of our authority figures.

But editorial cartooning has been around even longer than that. In fact, it is not beyond comprehension that we have never been without it, particularly if we are to define the word “editorial” as the exposition of a personal opinion and “cartooning” merely as the rendering of that opinion in pictorial form. Given such a description, we come to find that the earliest practitioners of the art form were editorializing on the walls of limestone caves in the south of France some 33,000 years ago, eons before the Bible places the events that took place in the Garden of Eden. Of even greater significance is how these cave drawings predate the invention of the written word by the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia by 30,000 years, proof that when it comes to the mode of communication upon which human beings have historically most relied, it is the visual depiction of our life’s experiences, rather than phonetic symbols arranged on a straight line, that have proven themselves most deeply meaningful.

That is just the first few paragraphs. Read the rest at the link above.

Now on with the show.

Let’s start with some cartoons on Malala Yousafzia, the Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban early last week.

JJ. I always enjoy the cartoons! I also loved the article on editorial cartoons. My favorite was the little girl “now understanding”. By the way i left a spill on the aisle below, i kinda of went on a tear. if I upset anyone sorry. Unfortunately i have to go back to work in 30 minutes so I can’t be here.

This shit will settle down when the election is done or when someone gets kicked hard enough. pdgrey put this in the last thread. David Ignatius, who has CIA contacts, has the talking points they prepared and quotes from the guy who put the intelligence together. Not one damn thing contradicts what Susan Rice or the administration has said at all.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) compromised the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications Friday, according to Obama administration officials.

The White House and State Department had no prior notice of what is often referred to in Washington as a Friday night “document dump” on the weekend before the presidential foreign policy debate. A senior official tells NBC News that many of these documents weren’t provided by the State Department to the Oversight committee— and there wasn’t any discussion about their sensitivity prior to the committee posting them online. Only about 50 pages of the 166 had been previously released.

The official says had the State Department been given that opportunity, they would have pointed out which documents needed to be handled with extreme care so as not to endanger anyone.

Wonder where the other documents came from if not from the State Dept hearing?

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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.

You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.